When Elon Musk first started talking about launching a brain-computer interface company, he made a number of comments that set expectations for what that idea might entail. The company, he said, was motivated by his concerns about AI ending up hostile to humans: providing humans with an interface directly into the AI's home turf might prevent hostilities from developing. Musk also suggested that he hoped to avoid any electrodes implanted in the brain, since that might pose a barrier to adoption.

At his recent public launch of the company (since named Neuralink), worries about hostile AIs did get a mention—but only in passing. Instead, we got a detailed technical description of the hardware behind Neuralink's brain-computer interface, which would rely on surgery and implanted hardware. In the process, Neuralink went from something in the realm of science fiction to a company that would be pushing for an aggressive evolution of existing neural-implant hardware.

Those changes in tone and topic are a sign that Musk has been listening to the people he hired to build Neuralink. So, how precisely is Neuralink pushing the envelope on what we can already do in this space? And does it still veer a bit closer to science fiction in some aspects?

The big picture

Before taking a look at the individual components that Neuralink announced recently, let's start with an overview of what the company hopes to accomplish technology-wise. The plan is to access the brain via a hole less than eight millimeters across. This small hole would allow Neuralink to implant an even smaller (4mm x 4mm) chip and its associated wiring into the brain. The chip will get power from, and communicate with, some wireless hardware located behind the ear, much like current cochlear implants.

Inside the brain, the chip will be connected to a series of small threads that carry electrodes to the relevant area, where they can listen in on the electrical activity of neurons. These threads will be put in place using a surgical robot, which allows the surgeon to insert them in a manner that avoids damaging blood vessels.

The chip will take the raw readings of neural activity and process them to a very compact form that preserves key information, which will be easier for their wireless hardware to transmit back across the skull. Electrical impulses can also be sent to the neurons via the same electrodes, stimulating brain activity. Musk thinks that it would be safe to insert as many as 10 of these chips into a single brain, though Neuralink will obviously start testing with far fewer.

All of that is an evolution of some of the existing work on brain-computer interfaces. But the details behind some of these features provides a better sense of how Neuralink is pushing the field forward.

Would you let this robot stick electrodes in your brain?

John Timmer

A look at the robot from Neuralink's presentation (it could pass as an optometrist tool at a glance, no?).

The robot

The Neuralink introduction included a video of the brain during surgery, revealing how the wrinkly organ constantly shifts with breathing and blood flow. This makes implanting electrodes a challenge, especially since much of the brain is laced with blood vessels that the electrodes could easily puncture. Plus, due to their incredibly small size, the electrodes themselves are susceptible to damage.

The robot keeps a surgeon in charge, but it turns the process of electrode implantation into something closer to a video game. Using a microscope integrated into the robot, a surgeon is given a static view of the underlying brain, thanks to software that compensates for the pulsing and shifting. With the static view, implanting the electrodes becomes something like a point-and-click activity: the surgeon selects a location, and the robot inserts the electrode there while compensating for any ensuing movement of the underlying tissue. Although video showed its insertion method as looking like a violent stab, the hardware protects the electrodes from damage at this point.

This method certainly has the potential to make electrode implantation safer, in part by minimizing the risk of blood-vessel damage. But let me be clear: while the electrodes are small enough that they're not dramatically larger than the neurons they interact with, there's still the potential for damage to those neurons or their support cells during the electrode insertion, as well as some disruption of the connections among neurons. That potential may be lowered by the robot, but it's not going away.

One other issue that the robot doesn't obviously solve is that several of the images displayed during the Neuralink introduction showed the chips being located somewhere other than where the electrodes were targeted. There's certainly enough play in the wiring of the electrodes to allow a bit of distance between the two, but it's hard to understand how this can be managed with a single, small surgical incision.

The electrodes

In existing systems, the electrodes are their own distinct hardware component, but Neuralink is seeking to change this. The company hopes to do so by producing the metal portion of the electrodes as it's building layers of metal into the chips used for processing the electrode data. This provides some real advantages, as the process technology used there is already operating at the sort of fine scales that make structure of the electrodes easy.

This setup would also do away with any bulky connector hardware currently needed to link electrodes with the rest of the system—they're already part of it. Presumably, Neuralink will manufacture chips with electrodes of different lengths to allow for flexibility in the implantation process.

In use, multiple electrodes will be combined into a single "thread," with polymer layers providing insulation to avoid cross-talk. Additional polymer layers will protect the thread from the environment of the brain, which Vanessa Tolosa of Neuralink described as "harsh." The electrode and polymer materials were both chosen to limit inflammatory and other immune responses.

Overall, this part of Neuralink's approach seemed solid, although a full evaluation will have to wait for longer-term studies of a thread's safety and useful lifetime inside an actual brain. Scar development was a real problem with early electrodes made by others, but further development has limited this problem. Presumably, Neuralink has already learned from others here.

An interesting way to describe how Musk thinks is about solving orthogonalities. The profit motives of carmakers and the environmental needs are not meaningfully connected? Let's make it so people want to buy electric cars. The political motives and our actual needs in spaceflight don't align? Let's push it to the point where a flags and footprint mission every fifty years doesn't win elections and old space can't afford to pay nice "consulting fees" to retired politicians.

Now he's onto the actual orthogonality theorem: We don't know if there's a link between higher intelligence and ethical behavior? Let's just make it so - much easier than finding out!

Where I think Neuralink might make the biggest difference is in designing integrated systems that are practical enough for widespread use. (Edit: and by "widespread use" I mean a substantial fraction of paralyzed patients, not healthy people looking for "augmentation".)

Systems like BrainGate are seriously amazing, but they're typically cobbled together out of a lot of off-the-shelf components. They have to be - even with a large academic research group, every sub-problem has to be something that can be solved by a few grad students or postdocs in a year or two, which means there's only enough resources to custom design a few critical hardware components. Traditional biotechs can improve on the BrainGate, but they won't do much without an obvious market. Musk is, once again, creating a company that will create new demand rather than react to the demands based on old technologies.

Ive always wondered if it wasn’t for Hollywood’s portrayal of “evil” runaway AI, would people be as concerned about solving this “problem?”

Personally I think rogue AI is a bit silly, but I suppose it’s completely possible. Because as we all know, people are dicks.

The biggest problem we KNOW exists is the paperclip maximizer problem. That's not Hollywood, that's acknowledging we don't know how to ingrain human value structures in our machines. If we get a human level AI without a solution to that problem... Well, that actually IS terrifying. It's not a "now" problem, but it is a problem.

I think that although the associated problems are hard(!), they are not impossibly so, as in break-the-laws-of-physics impossible.

At some point in the future, we *will* have high bandwidth DNIs (or will have changed the substrate we exist on) but we still have to get there from here, hence Neuralink. You have to start somewhere. One of the upsides is going to be the enormous amount of data coming from these experiments which will further our understanding of brain function.

Ive always wondered if it wasn’t for Hollywood’s portrayal of “evil” runaway AI, would people be as concerned about solving this “problem?”

Personally I think rogue AI is a bit silly, but I suppose it’s completely possible. Because as we all know, people are dicks.

The biggest problem we KNOW exists is the paperclip maximizer problem. That's not Hollywood, that's acknowledging we don't know how to ingrain human value structures in our machines. If we get a human level AI without a solution to that problem... Well, that actually IS terrifying. It's not a "now" problem, but it is a problem.

Elective neurosurgery for perfectly healthy folks will not gain FDA approval in my lifetime, nor in yours (nor should it). Once again he'll substantially advance a field while simultaneously embarrassing the hell out of it.

Speaking only for myself, I'm glad I won't face the dilemma of needing to accept scary-as-hell surgery (opening up my head and working on my healthy brain) in order to compete in the workplace with those who have already chosen that path. Maybe my hypothetical grandchildren will, although even that prospect I treat with considerable skepticism.

The advances for those who don't have fully-functional nervous systems, the paralyzed and such, are obviously very exciting.

I’m not a neuroscientist but I’m married to one who used to use electrodes to reverse engineer the visual system. The potential of this technology is really exciting just from the perspective of what the researchers I know were trying to do, even before you get to therapeutic use, but do I ever hope that Musk has taken to heart the concept of a long-term investment. Everyone I knew had stories about problems they’d learned over much shorter timeframes and I can’t imagine how many interesting things would happen over longer ones.

Elon aside, I'm glad that someone is focusing on this issue because it's the sort of pursuit that is so expensive and risky (from a business ROI perspective) that it probably wouldn't get much research attention otherwise. I'm not sure what to think about the "AI home turf" statement, but the ability to interface with machines directly has obvious implications for anyone with paralysis or other motor system deficiencies. From there you start thinking about Neuromancer, which is nuts ... maybe this the AI home turf thing. Anyway, pretty interesting stuff.

Excited because, if he sticks with it, I'm confident Musk will undoubtedly make some substantial engineering advances, and thereby produce useful hardware and software that (I hope) clinical researchers in this field will be able to access in order to better advance their own research and development in the field of robotic prosthetics for the handicapped.

Discouraged because, true to form, he musks up this noble and achievable goal with sheer nonsense about creating brain/machine interfaces for Joe Sixpack to better view cat videos and play Texas Hold'em online.

Elective neurosurgery for perfectly healthy folks will not gain FDA approval in my lifetime, nor in yours (nor should it). Once again he'll substantially advance a field while simultaneously embarrassing the hell out of it.

it might, depending how invasive it is, there are really attractive applications, for instance, finer control for robots used by bomb techs, semi-active exoskeletons that don't result in slower response

Read a very long article about this a couple of years ago. After setting aside the fact that the author seemed like quite the Neuralink booster, the thing that stuck out was just how insanely difficult a more general-purpose brain interface will be to create.

What is this actually for? I mean what would I do with it? Controlling a mouse cursor doesn't seem to warrant having an 8mm hole drilled in my head and a proprietary electronic device attached to my brain, if I'm not disabled.

What is this actually for? I mean what would I do with it? Controlling a mouse cursor doesn't seem to warrant having an 8mm hole drilled in my head and a proprietary electronic device attached to my brain, if I'm not disabled.

Think about moving everything you can do from your smartphone into your brain.

Then multiply by 1000.

Controlling the motor cortex is just the beginning (and is already here).

Ive always wondered if it wasn’t for Hollywood’s portrayal of “evil” runaway AI, would people be as concerned about solving this “problem?”

Personally I think rogue AI is a bit silly, but I suppose it’s completely possible. Because as we all know, people are dicks.

The biggest problem we KNOW exists is the paperclip maximizer problem. That's not Hollywood, that's acknowledging we don't know how to ingrain human value structures in our machines. If we get a human level AI without a solution to that problem... Well, that actually IS terrifying. It's not a "now" problem, but it is a problem.

And the concept of rogue AI doesn't have to mean an autonomous Terminator. Think more rogue regime with access to AI. Just look at how major elections where messed up with much simpler tools, or where China is heading with just crude data collection. Democratizing AI and making it more accessible or common is one idea to defend against a dangerous monopoly.